Today's Opinions

A great deal of concern centers around the poor condition of roads and bridges, both dirt and paved, in Lancaster County. Any time this subject is brought before our county administrator or County Council, the same answer always comes forth, “We don’t have money to fix your problem.”
We are all aware paving or repairing roads is expensive; however, do we not always find money to do what council places as a top priority?

On Aug. 16, I woke up from a power nap and started getting ready for my 12-hour shift job. Before I left I kissed my wife, 6-year-old daughter and my visiting sister all goodbye and walked out the door. My daughter screamed, “Wait daddy. I want another hug and a kiss.”

I recently attended a back-to-school event at the Micheal Blackmon Foundation for the children of our community. Councilwoman Linda Blackmon-Brace greeted everyone as they entered the foundation, young and old alike.

The Obama jobs speech was out of touch to say the least. It starts out with reducing $175 billion to Social Security and Medicare (with another $1/2 trillion to be cut from Medicare under Obamacare in the future). And Democrats tell us Republicans want to hurt seniors? And how does this create jobs? It spends more than $140 billion on union pandering to try and buy back union votes at our expense.

On Aug. 25, the Lancaster County Chamber of Commerce held its State of Education Breakfast, an event that some of you attended. Guest speakers included Dr. Gene Moore, Lancaster County School Superintendent, Dr. Greg Rutherford, president of York Technical College, Dr. John Catalano, dean at the University of South Carolina at Lancaster, and Robert C. Barnett, vice president of education for the S.C. Chamber of Commerce.

Merrel Wilkenfeld’s in his letter, “Radical right should embrace whole Constitution,” in the Sept. 4 edition of The Lancaster News, has proven again that the left is really uninformed, misinformed and does not know or understand the Constitution.
The so called radical, religious right is more tuned into the Constitution than the left. The left always brings out the words – separation of church and state – mentioned in the Constitution. I ask them to go and read the separation-of-church-and-state clause again.

It was a perfect night for a movie. Caroline Hasty, events manager for the city of Lancaster, got the elderly man a chair and sat it up on the grass at the normally vacant lot at the corner of Main and Gay streets Saturday night. I use the term “elderly” loosely, but I’m 60 and he was older than me.
Hasty told me that the man always spoke to her when they meet on the street, that he lived alone at the Parr Apartments and that she told him if he came to the movie she would make sure he had a chair. She did.

When I was home visiting my family this summer, I opened a cardboard box that had been sealed for nearly 10 years. Inside were items I had carefully and reverently packed away, knowing that someday I would want to see them again – knowing that they were artifacts from a terrible time in our country’s history.